Sagaria

by John Dahlgren

  “You never spoke a truer word, young man,” said Samzing from behind them.

  He and Sir Tombin had been content to follow in the others’ wake.

  The comment surprised Sagandran; if he ever thought someone was the epitome of an unconcentrated, unfocused magician, it was Samzing.

  They passed a group of magic-users – some young, like Shano, others as old as Samzing and Fattanillo – dressed in robes of various colors. The sea-blue of Shano’s attire was common, but so was a deep and satisfying blood-red. Other distinctive shades were less frequent. One young woman was wearing a robe the yellow of a canary’s belly, but paler; it made a striking contrast with her skin, which was as dark as Perima’s.

  Perhaps because she noticed this, Perima asked Shano what the significance of the different colors was.

  “Each color represents an element,” Shano replied. His voice was patient, but it was obvious that the answer was elementary to anyone who had been in Qarnapheeran for more than a few minutes. “The blue robes represent the element of water. Magicians wearing blue robes habitually, as it were, draw their power from the oceans, rivers, lakes and rain. Yellow robes signify the element, air. Those are the magicians of the clouds, the winds and the air you breathe. Green is the color of the element earth. Green-clad magicians derive their abilities from the ground and from all the things that grow in it: flowers, bushes, the trees of the forests. Red symbolizes the fourth of the elements, fire. Lightning, flames, blood, volcanic eruptions – that’s where those magicians gain their abilities.”

  Perima paused and looked back at the people they’d passed. “But I can see far more colors than just those four.”

  Shano took a breath, maintaining his cooperative smile. “Yes, that’s true. The other colors are worn by magicians who draw their magic from more than a single element. Imagine you were mixing the hues of the elements like paints on a palette. A wizard who can call upon both water and fire for magic would wear a purple robe, and so on. You have to be highly skilled to derive power from more than one element, but there are plenty of highly skilled wizards in Qarnapheeran.”

  He suddenly looked annoyed with himself, as people do when they’ve been patronizing simpletons so thoughtlessly that they’ve managed to make an error with the basics.

  “Maybe I was wrong to talk of paints on a palette. Imagine instead the way all the colors of the spectrum blend together to give us the pure white of sunlight. If you see someone in a white robe, you’ll know that this is a wizard who has mastered the magics of all the elements. Such people are very rare indeed.”

  “So they’re the most skilled of all?” inquired Perima.

  Shano grinned again, his good humor returning. “Oh no, nobody can ever become that.”

  Sagandran’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t understand.”

  “The highest level of all can never exist,” said Shano. “One of the first things you discover about magic is that there’s always more to learn, always fresh understanding to master. It’s as if you were climbing a mountain that stretched upward forever, a mountain whose summit you could never reach no matter how high you climbed. You will never gain an understanding of magic unless you can accept this, indeed, welcome it, before you start.”

  Sagandran frowned yet harder. He could grasp what the young wizard was trying to tell him, and in a way it was a much more satisfying scenario than the idea of just clawing one’s way to the top and then being king of the castle. At the same time, he realized that most of the people he knew back on the Earthworld would have turned their noses up at the notion. People like Webster O’Malley’s dad, and even Sagandran’s own dad, thought success was getting to the top as quickly as possible and staying there, or finding a new and higher summit to climb to. They wanted to be the company boss, or the richest man in the neighborhood or even (the slightly nuttier ones) to rule the world. The idea that there was no top to be reached would have been anathema to them, were they, by some unlikely chance, to hear about it. Yet, walking along beside Shano, Sagandran realized that always trying to be better than you were now was really a beautiful thing in itself.

  Thinking these thoughts, he missed the next few exchanges of the conversation. By the time his mind returned to the present, it was Sir Tombin who was putting a question to Shano.

  “When you mix paints,” the Frogly Knight was saying, “and you mush all the colors together, it’s not white you get, but black. Are there magicians with black robes too who, as much as the ones in white, have succeeded in bringing together lots of different forms of magic?”

  Shano scowled unhappily. “Yes, there are black-robed wizards, but you won’t find them here in Qarnapheeran, nor even in Sagaria as a whole. They have mastered many forms of magic, yes, but they have perverted their knowledge and powers to evil ends. Scores of them were banished from Sagaria to the Shadow World over five hundred years ago after they had wreaked great havoc during the wars that raged across the world in those days. None of that ilk has been seen in Sagaria since.”

  “Let us hope,” said Sir Tombin softly, “they never will be again. It is to try and ensure this is so that we’ve come here, you know.”

  “I know,” responded Shano gravely, in the same quiet tones.

  Flip, sitting in the brim of Sir Tombin’s hat, had a question as well. “What sorts of magic have the black-robed wizards blended together?”

  Shano avoided giving an answer. “The temple is ahead of us now. It is regarded as one of the crowning glories of Qarnapheeran.”

  Flip gave a little whistle of awe, and Sagandran only just stopped from doing the same. While the other buildings they’d seen were comparatively modest in scale, like Qarnapheeran itself, the temple was huge. It wasn’t especially tall. Back home in the Earthworld, Sagandran would have guessed that it had eight or ten stories, but it was broad and covered a great area. It gave the impression of sheer massiveness as it squatted among expansive, well-tended gardens where the water in the fountains played and scores of wizards quietly strolled or lounged about studying scrolls. This astonishing sense of bulk gave it an aura of enormous antiquity, as if it could have been built even before the world itself; as if it might be older than the very ground it stood on. The other buildings had a grace born of lightness, of delicacy; this one had as much grace or more, but it was the grace of confident power.

  They walked along a broad, straight path, appeared to be fashioned out of a single slab of white marble, toward the tall gray stone doorway of the temple. The splashing of the fountains was like music to Sagandran’s ears. Brightly feathered birds, unconcerned by the proximity of human beings, wandered calmly among the neatly tailored flower beds and ambling magicians. He recognized peacocks and lyrebirds, but these were among the very drabbest in their plumage. The feathers of one bird in particular shone with the metallic gleam of multicolored aluminum burnished to a high polish; looking at it for more than a few seconds almost made Sagandran’s eyes sting.

  Shano held up a hand when they were in front of the huge temple doors.

  “No one but magicians of the highest ability are able to enter this place as well as those under their immediate protection,” he announced solemnly. “There are fields of magical flux inside the temple that could tear your soul apart, not to mention your body, limb from limb. Be careful to stay close until I leave you in the presence of wizards far greater than I.”

  Samzing raised an eyebrow. “You’re standing right next to one, young sprig,” he said.

  Shano gave him a condescending smile. “Why, yes, I had indeed forgotten, and you’re quite right to remind me. Ol’ Fishface, is it not?”

  He had turned to open the door by the time Samzing’s glare hit him, so he was spared the full impact of it. Even so, he staggered.

  Samzing saw Perima and Sagandran looking at him and winked.

  With a slow scraping noise, the doors eased themselves back and the interior of the temple was revealed.

  Stillness. That was the first sense
Sagandran got from it – stillness and an immense air of timeless tranquility. As they followed Shano over the threshold, their footsteps seemed muffled, as did the sound of their own breathing. Sagandran had the feeling that he could shout as loud as he wanted to and the sound would come out as no more than a murmur.

  It was a little darker inside than it was in the bright sunshine outside, but only a little. Enormous windows of stained glass stretched from floor to ceiling on every side; they made the ones in Queen Mirabella’s throne room look like poky little portholes by comparison. The temple windows were paralleled – mirrored, Sagandran wanted to say – by tall, fluted silvery pillars that seemed less carved from stone than spun out of cobwebs. The floor was made mainly of the same gray stone as the doors, but it was highly polished. When he looked down, he could see his own reflection gazing up at him, but he didn’t look downward very much; he was too busy staring around him, drinking in the grandeur of the place.

  It took him a few moments to realize that, interspersed among the windows, there were wooden doors. He wondered where they all led, if not directly, into the gardens, for they seemed to be set in the temple’s outer walls. As he watched, a yellow-robed wizard emerged from one of them. Sagandran could see another large room beyond the woman’s shoulder as she turned to close the door behind her. Perhaps, he mused, if they can tell the clock hands what to do, they can do the same with the dimensions of space as well.

  At the far end of the mighty hall, two staircases spiraled upward and Shano seemed to be leading the companions toward them. In the center of the floor, the young wizard paused again. Here there was a large circular mosaic made of countless tiny stone chips in as many colors as the birds outside had feathers. Sagandran looked at the designs, but none of them made any sense to him; they weren’t pictures, and they didn’t appear to be any form of writing. Some of them seemed to scuttle out of his gaze when he tried to focus on them.

  “Rather than make you climb all those stairs,” said Shano easily, “I’ll transport you to the top of the temple myself. I was told by Grand Master Fariam to bring you into his presence as swiftly as possible, and this will be much quicker. Please make sure you’re all standing inside the perimeter of the rune disk.”

  The rune disk, thought Sagandran. That must be what they call this mosaic. The way Shano’s talking about it, he sounds exactly like an elevator operator telling us to stand clear of the doors. He grinned secretly to Perima. She didn’t respond.

  Samzing nonchalantly stepped onto the very center of the mosaic, right next to Shano; what their blue-robed escort was about to do was obviously nothing new to the old wizard. Perima and Sagandran weren’t slow to follow, but Flip and, perhaps surprisingly, Sir Tombin, looked uneasy and reluctant.

  “Don’t worry, dear chap,” said Samzing reassuringly as the Frogly Knight dithered on the edge of the disk. “It’s perfectly safe. You won’t feel a thing.”

  “Not a thing?” said Flip doubtfully.

  “At the very most, a tiny lifting motion, and even then, only if this young whippersnapper’s clumsier than I think he is.”

  Samzing treated Shano to a broad smile. He got a stony look in return.

  “Don’t antagonize him, Samzing, for heaven’s sake,” mumbled Sir Tombin, putting one foot experimentally inside the circle and then, after a long pause, following it with the other.

  “Come over and stand by me, Sir Tombin, if it would make you feel safer,” said Perima sweetly.

  “There are times, young lass, when I …” Sir Tombin left the sentence unfinished. Trying to make it look as if he were doing anything else but, he walked over and stood beside her.

  Shano spread out his arms and began to speak in a whisper, a long fluid stream of words that Sagandran recognized as language, even if he didn’t know which language it was. It was as if the sense of the words was somewhere tantalizingly beyond the fringes of his ability to comprehend them.

  The rune disk began to give off a pale glow, then suddenly its symbols were dashing around in a million different crazed motions, like the sparks rising into the night air over a crackling campfire. Sagandran felt a warm gust of wind sweep over him and a bizarre, but not unpleasant, sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if tiny fingers were stroking him there. The warmth of the wind seemed to not just brush his skin, but also to fill his vision, so that he could see but not see at the same time.

  He was just beginning to puzzle out how this could be so when the mist cleared and the companions found themselves standing alongside Shano on the rune disk but now in a grandly decorated room. Sagandran was reminded of pictures he’d seen back on Earthworld of the palace of some crazed Bavarian monarch, where every chamber, every surface, every stick of furniture was covered in embellishment upon embellishment upon embellishment, all gilded or painted until no sign of their original material remained.

  The battering of the senses by the gross over-ornamentation was quite overwhelming, and he looked around for somewhere he could sit down. Having finally identified something that looked like an ironmonger’s nightmare as a chair, he decided to stay standing.

  “This is the Grand Master’s antechamber.” Shano spoke in a reverential whisper. “I must go and tell him you’re here for your audience with him.”

  He walked across the room, dodging past an ornately chiseled occasional table that seemed to want to tackle him, and disappeared through a small and incongruously humble door.

  Sagandran let out his breath. “How come there’s a place as kitsch as this in the middle of a city so, well, elegant as Qarnapheeran?” he said, fixing his eye on Samzing as presumably their resident expert on all matters to do with Qarnapheeran.

  “It’s a reminder,” said Samzing solemnly. “A reminder of the folly of human self-aggrandizement. However you choose to look at it, the Grand Master here in Qarnapheeran is the most powerful person in all Sagaria. If he were some petty monarch, he’d surround himself with supposed splendor, thinking that by doing so he’d be telling all the world how grand and important he was. But in reality, true power is humble and modest. Successive Grand Masters have kept this antechamber like it is, in all its hideousness, to remind themselves of that fact.”

  Sagandran stared numbly up at a chandelier that was strongly reminiscent of a squad of octopuses having a wrestling match, and shuddered. “One of those reminders you can never forget,” he said.

  At last Sir Tombin was beginning to relax a little, having checked that the upward transportation hadn’t left most of his innards back in the main hall. “You’ve been here before, have you?” he asked Samzing.

  The old wizard became shifty. “Well, yes I have, as a matter of fact. Myself and Fats, whose fault it had all been, were summoned here to—ah, Shano, my good chap, you’re with us again.”

  Unnoticed by the others, the young man had slipped back into the room. The expression on his face was one of deep humility.

  “The Grand Master will see you now.” There was a faint quiver in his voice.

  “Fariam, you say, eh?” Samzing knotted his fingers. “Don’t recall the name. He must have come here after my time. Probably just as well.”

  Something in the glitter of his eyes told Sagandran that the old wizard was not telling the entire truth.

  Shano led them into a large, circular room. Here, the furnishings were sparse and plain, a blessed relief after the claustrophobia of the antechamber. There were no windows; the only sources of light were candles mounted in a score or more of sconces. Their soft flickering made the big shadows of the companions dance along the walls. Half-a-dozen wooden chairs had been placed in a semicircle facing them; the central one was little more than a milking stool. Sagandran guessed this was where the Grand Master would sit to be reminded yet again of the humility he should embrace.

  Even though the chairs were empty, Shano bowed deeply toward them.

  “Oh, Grand Master and Councilors, here are the travelers of whom Queen Mirabella of Spectram sent you word.” />
  “Who’s he talking to?” Sagandran mouthed to Perima, next to him. “There’s no one here but us.”

  A soft voice answered him out of the empty air. “That, young wayfarer, is the difference between a wizard and an ordinary mortal. The wizard knows that just because you cannot see something does not mean that it isn’t there.”

  But I know that perfectly well, thought Sagandran. Atoms for a start.

  There was a sudden change in the quality of the air, and he realized that all this time, the newcomers had been being watched by people sitting in the chairs. None of them were young; they had faces wrinkled like crabapples. The most ancient-looking of all was the man sitting on the stool in the center. His robe had the purity of freshly fallen snow, or maybe it was just that his long white hair and beard surrounded him like a robe.

  “And perhaps you do,” said the ancient wizard who was surely Fariam, the Grand Master. The voice was the one that had spoken to Sagandran a moment earlier out of nothingness. “It is always my sin to presume too much of my own wisdom.” He bowed his head slightly in apology. More loudly, he added, “Welcome to Qarnapheeran, travelers. Queen Mirabella has told me much about you and why you have come here. I am glad to be assured by my own eyes that you have survived your hazardous journey. The world outside this city of ours is growing more dangerous each day.” He sighed, a sound like the breeze playing among dried fallen pine needles. “Arkanamon is on the march. We knew the day could not be postponed forever, but still, it is sad to see it come at all.”